Earlier in the year I photographed a male osprey eating a trout on a telegraph pole near the Dam end of the lake. At the time I thought it was Dylan, as he was unringed. I checked the livestream and he happened to be on the nest at the time, which meant this bird wasn’t Dylan. After about half and hour watching him from close range he decided to move on with the fish. I was left pondering about him, and whether he would be seen on the nest camera as an intruder or not. He didn’t, which I thought was a bit odd.
After a few days, I received a message about a pair of osprey on a nest, on the Clywedog! I couldn’t believe my eyes. I went straight up in the morning with my camera, and done some filming. I seen a female osprey which appeared to be sitting on eggs WOW this was amazing. I was so excited about this, but I was brought back to down to earth when I realised where it was. It was literally beside a footpath as I seen an old gentleman walking up the footpath, I knew then I have my work cut out here. Luckily I have some good friends who helped me monitor the nest while I tried to make contact with the land owners. I spoke to a few different people for advice on how to protect them, they did say that the birds have chosen the area and will have had some idea of the disturbances levels, and will be fairly happy with it.
I wasnt totally convinced by this, so we decided to watch how the birds react to the walkers, and time how long they leave the nest for. We also would talk to the walkers and ask them if they really wanted to walk down after knowing of the osprey nest being there. Most of them would turn around and not want to disturb them. But some didn’t understand the significance of it and carried on regardless.
During the spring half term the amount of walkers that disturbed them was heartbreaking for me and I probably shouldn’t of shown my feelings to some of the people, but I felt so helpless. I decided that this was not the approach that was going to work, So I managed to get the area closed off to the public after speaking with the rangers at Hafren Dyrwdry who were very helpful. We got the paths closed off to the public. We made up some signs and put them out along the paths.
At this point I had pretty much wrote off this year for them, as I felt they had been off the eggs for too long at a time, and too often. I felt any eggs would of been chilled and they would of failed, my reasoning for trying to give them as much peace was so that they atleast don’t disperse and abandon the area. So when I had a message from one of my friends saying “Chick!” She is feeding a chick, I literally choked on my drink. I was over the moon, and when I went up to my usual view point, I noticed a visual change to the birds behaviour, they literally were no longer happy with me where they used to fine. So that was very interesting. I had no idea when the egg hatched or how many were in the nest, so it brought me back to the old days on the primary nest, where I would count how many chicks poops I could see.
There was only one chick, but after the sadness of the goshawk attack on 8B1, this really made things abit better. The chick was ringed and was a female she weighed a very good 1670g, with the Darvic ring used 7B9.
Now the one thing I haven’t talked about yet is the parents, this is something quite big I believe, as she is the first known Welsh born female to be breeding in Wales. Blue Z5 she is a 2020 bird from the BM nest in North Wales, and is the daughter of Tegid Z1 and granddaughter of Monty at the Dyfi Osprey project. The male is an unringed, just like Dylan so his information isn’t known, although I’m sure I’ve seen him here last year, and that he had been seen intruding the main nest earlier this year.
The best place to view them without disturbing will be from the view point at Bwlch y Gle, you will need some good binoculars though. They have now left on their migration, so you will have to wait until next year now though.
The Clywedog Ospreys 